She has met the enemy, and it is us

The most powerful book I've read this year

When I was a beardless youth, I loved meeting new people - especially if they were girls. I had a clever, clownish way of flirting that didn’t work on everyone but quickly validated any potential chemistry. In a significant percentage of cases, however, an initial period of joking and chatting would end with the person laughing and saying, “You remind me SO MUCH of this other person I know!”

There are few things more demoralizing to a solipsistic teenager than being consigned to a type. Oh, so you know another nerdy white boy with a sense of humor? How droll. But you do realize that I’m one of a kind? This boy might be nerdy, white, and funny like me, but his brand of nerdy, white, humorous boyness is dull and flavorless while mine is unique and precious beyond measure. 

In retrospect, there were way tougher types to be lumped in with. At least my type  wasn’t considered inherently inferior or dangerous, as with pretty much any type that wasn’t young, white, and male. And yet, as someone who always felt like an outsider, that sense of specialness - that weirdness - was something I clung to hard. Nowadays I know full well that mediocre white men like me are a dime a dozen, and yet, when I showed up at someone’s birthday barbecue last summer wearing the same obscure printed shirt as another guest, I found myself simmering with jealous indignation. How dare this rando step on my bit - doesn’t he know who he’s dealing with? At least I was self-aware enough to laugh at myself for thinking like an ass. 

Encountering a double was a bit more challenging for Naomi Klein, the author of popular lefty critiques of capitalism such as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. First of all, her double is also a famous author, one with a very active media presence. But worse, she’s someone who, after having gained her reputation mining feminist territory contiguous with Klein’s structural analyses, slowly started going off the deep end and turned up as one of the funhouse figures of the far right, spewing bile and nonsense diametrically opposed to Klein’s hard-won, research-based work. And worst of all, despite their stark differences, other people couldn’t seem to tell them apart. 

The double in question is Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and now an outspoken vaccine denier and darling of Steven Bannon. Tired of constantly being credited with Wolf’s increasingly dangerous outrages - simply because they share a first name, a Jewish background, and a minor celebrity among bookish lefties - Klein took time from her work on climate research and activism to write a memoir called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. What started as a need to scratch a very personal itch turned into a project that does a better job of almost anything I’ve recently read of identifying and analyzing the messy ongoing catastrophes of today’s world. 

Klein admits to feeling sheepish at the beginning of the project. No Logo was an outspoken screed against the corporatization of culture, and Klein claimed for years to be against the concept of personal branding. And yet, she admits, she was as susceptible to it as anyone else - as she fully realized when she felt her own personal brand being threatened by her bizarro-world doppelganger. 

It could have ended there and made a nice little essay, but Klein is a tenacious thinker, and in this book she keeps unraveling the thread to see where it leads. It’s not enough for her to question the nefarious ends to which Wolf sacrificed her own hard-won reputation. She understands that, when someone disappears into a conspiracy-fueled whirlpool, they don’t disappear from sight - instead, they resurface in what Klein calls the Mirror Word, where millions of people revel in beliefs that we find comical or disturbing. We may block out what they say, but our scorn for these ideas just makes them more powerful. 

Instead of turning away from the foreign and frightening place, Klein decides to break through, spending countless hours listening to Bannon’s War Room podcast and trawling conservative social media platforms to try and understand the genesis of these words and thoughts that are erroneously attributed to her. She uses this one-way relationship with her flip-side avatar to go deep into social and literary history, identifying and analyzing the many trick mirrors that the rich and powerful use to keep us from seeing what’s most important. She takes us on a tour of the Mirror World (the far right echo chamber whose adherents speak out against fabricated fascism in the name of actual fascism) and into the Shadow Lands (the systems of exploitation and oppression that treat human life as disposable in order to prop up the illusions of capitalism), demonstrating along the way how willful liberal ignorance of these worlds only strengthens their ability to function. 

The lesson, repeated in infinite variations, is that none of us is an island. We refract what we don’t want to see about the world by creating Others to fear and excoriate. Klein shows us how our obsession with binaries directly leads to the proliferation of these doubles, creating a universal impression of stark contrasts rather than the actuality of subtle shadings and commonality that exist beneath our self-imposed definitions. 

She demonstrates how our culture has been gearing up toward this for generations, from the rapaciousness of colonial empires through the increasingly zealous adoption of zero-sum capitalist philosophies all the way up to the digital vagaries of social media self-presentation. When COVID hit, all of the ingredients were in place for a complete meltdown - and that’s where we’re at right now. Being asked to make sacrifices for the greater good drove many people insane, allowing them to position themselves as an oppressed underclass - a doppelganger of the way that the actually oppressed minorities in America have been treated for years. 

One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is the empathy Klein shows for those who have lost their way, who believe outlandish things in order to preserve some semblance of control over a mad world. She makes a compelling case that most of these people are reacting to the very real issues that affect all of us - a broken healthcare system, tech company overreach, governments who abandon those who need them most. The problem is that bad actors - driven by the dictates of capitalism, natch - compel them into false interpretations that turn them against others rather than finding common cause. 

That the book came out in September, before the current war in Gaza, marks Klein’s prescience in devoting her final section to a study of Israel as a textbook doppelganger state. She describes its founding as a backwards echo of the colonial expansion undertaken by the European powers it chose to emulate, and the government’s treatment of Palestinians as an upside-down version of the treatment of Jews by some of those same European powers during WWII. The way innocent residents of Gaza and the West Bank have been persecuted over the years is no secret, but her framing of the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in Israel’s official positions - and, implicitly, those of the U.S. - provides a powerful and evocative lens through which to view the current conflict. 

What’s the prescription for all of this? On the one hand, it’s knowledge - letting go of the illusions that give us comfort in order to visualize the entire system and understand how it works, so we can gain the perspective to fight against it. But in a sense, the people who “do their own research” in order to confirm their fears and biases believe they’re doing exactly that. The second, more important part of the formula is self-knowledge - examining who we are, what we think we want, and why we do what we do. Instead of denying reality in favor of our own entrenched and cordoned points of view, we need to confront our fears and biases directly - right in the mirror - and work through them to see what we have in common with the billions of people who might seem very different from us. Because the only way out of this is together. 

All of this was very important for me to hear. Back in the days when I thought I was inexpressibly unique, every interaction felt heavy with possibility. If there was no one else like me, then anything could happen. But aging feels like a winnowing of options. As my life has taken on certain definitive shapes, I’ve found myself becoming protective of the potential that’s preserved by not doing anything at all. COVID supercharged this, of course, but as with so many others - like Naomi Wolf and her followers - this trend was going on for years before that. And even though I haven’t fallen for quack cures and accounts of pedophiliac cabals, hiding inside myself has been a recipe for the sort of stagnant isolation where bad mental bacteria can breed.  

What Klein is implicitly urging in this book is to flip the formula. Each of us may be unique, but dwelling on that is no foundation for a functioning society. Our individual needs for health, safety, dignity, and respect can only be satisfied by coordinated effort. Understanding what we lack as individuals is the only way we can learn how to focus on what we share - first and foremost being a planet that cannot sustain the way we’re currently treating it. It’s a tall order, but the fate of the world literally depends on it.